of the population to grow up careless, and improvident, and
idle. Political economy proves that, instead of giving casual
ill-considered alms, we should educate people, teach them to work and
earn their own livings, and save up something to live upon in old age.
If they continue idle and improvident, they must suffer the results of
it. But as this seems hard-hearted treatment, political economists are
condemned by soft-hearted and mistaken people. The science is said to be
a dismal, cold-blooded one, and it is implied that the object of the
science is to make the rich richer, and to leave the poor to perish. All
this is quite mistaken.

The political economist, when he inquires how people may most easily
acquire riches, does not teach that the rich man should keep his wealth
like a miser, nor spend it in luxurious living like a spendthrift. There
is absolutely nothing in the science to dissuade the rich man from
spending his wealth generously and yet wisely. He may prudently help his
relatives and friends; he may establish useful public institutions,
such as free public libraries, museums, public parks, dispensaries, &c.;
he may assist in educating the poor, or promoting institutions for
higher education; he may relieve any who are suffering from misfortunes
which could not have been provided against; cripples, blind people, and
all who are absolutely disabled from helping themselves, are proper
objects of the rich man's charity. All that the political economist
insists upon is that #charity shall be really charity, and shall not
injure those whom it is intended to aid#. It is sad to think that
hitherto much harm has been done by those who wished only to do good.

It is sad, again, to see thousands of persons trying to improve their
positions by means which have just the opposite effect, I mean by
strikes, by refusing to use machinery, and by trying, in various ways,
to resist the production of wealth. Working men have made a political
economy of their own: they want to make themselves rich by taking care
not to produce too much riches. They, again, see an immediate effect of
what they do, but they do not see what happens as the after result. It
is the same with the question of Free Trade. In England we have at
length learned the wisdom of leaving commerce free. In other countries,
and even in the Australian Colonies, laws are yet passed to make people
richer by preventing them from using the abundant products of other